[gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org>]

Hi all,

We currently have both tcsh and csh in the tree.  For those who don't
know what they are: they are shells.  tcsh is the more sophisticated
little brother of csh.  Their relationship is roughly comparable to the
relationshop between bash and sh shells.

Like bash and sh, tcsh is able to replace csh as it is compatible with
it, hence most distributions install tcsh and a symlink csh -> tcsh
these days.

The tcsh ebuild used to create this symlink for csh, but due to a
mistake that I made it doesn't anymore now.  csh used to block on tcsh
which more or less meant that you had to choose for one or the other.

Problem here is that creating a conditional symlink for csh -> tcsh is a
bit dirty, and leaves the user with a system that has no csh in case the
csh is unmerged after tcsh was installed.

It appears that there are a few packages that depend on one of the shells.
For csh:
 *  media-gfx/maya
 *  sci-chemistry/namd
 *  sci-chemistry/sparky
For tcsh:
 *  media-gfx/maya
    media-gfx/radiance
    net-analyzer/sara
    sci-biology/ncbi-tools
    sci-chemistry/gamess
    sci-chemistry/gromacs
 *  sci-chemistry/namd
    sci-chemistry/nmrpipe
 *  sci-chemistry/sparky
    x86 dev-lang/gnat

All packages that depend on csh also depend on tcsh (or relation).

Because csh is rather old and tcsh can be used as replacement, I would
like to have csh removed from the tree, then have tcsh always providing
the symlink csh -> tcsh.  The situation is a bit the same as Gentoo not
providing an ebuild for sh, and bash just installing a symlink for
sh -> bash.

Are there any objections to removing csh from the tree?  If there are no
problems with csh removal before Feb 1st 2006, then I will starting from
that date work on getting csh removed by masking it, blocking tcsh and
csh, and request for updates of the packages that depend on csh.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
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